Placing Functionality in Fault-Tolerant Hardware/Software Reconfigurable Networks

A novel framework shows the potential of FPGA-based systems for increasing fault-tolerance and flexibility by placing functionality onto free hardware (HW) or software (SW) resources at runtime. Based on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in combination with CPUs, tasks implemented in HW or SW will migrate between computational nodes in a network. Moreover, if not enough HW/SW resources are available, the migration of functionality from HW to SW or vice versa is provided. By integrating this resource management, also called online HW/SW partitioning, in a distributed operating system for networked systems, a substantial step towards self-adaptive systems has been done. Besides a short motivation for this project and the presentation of related work, this paper gives an idea about a novel approach and a powerful experimental setup.